Thursday, August 27, 2015

I used to be part of the anti-GMO thing until it was pointed out how
without GMO foods we would lose a billion or two people to starvation.
As of today we have 7.363 billion people on this planet and are headed
towards a massive population crash like a runaway train.

Loss of several billion people to starvation is inevitable unless we stop the population bomb now with one child only policies.

Intuition can encourage opinions that are contrary to the facts

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have met with enormous public opposition over the past two decades. Manypeople
believe that GMOs are bad for their health – even poisonous – and that
they damage the environment. This is in spite of overwhelming scientific
evidence that proves that GMOs are safe to eat, and that they bring environmental benefits
by making agriculture more sustainable. Why is there such a discrepancy
between what the science tells us about GMOs, and what people think? To
be sure, some concerns, such as herbicide resistance in weeds and the
involvement of multinationals, are not without basis, but they are not
specific to GMOs. Hence, another question we need to answer is why these
arguments become more salient in the context of GMOs.

I recently published a paper,
with a group of Belgian biotechnologists and philosophers from Ghent
University, arguing that negative representations of GMOs are widespread
and compelling because they are intuitively appealing. By tapping into
intuitions and emotions that mostly work under the radar of conscious
awareness, but are constituent of any normally functioning human mind,
such representations become easy to think. They capture our attention,
they are easily processed and remembered and thus stand a greater chance
of being transmitted and becoming popular, even if they are untrue. Thus, many people oppose GMOs, in part, because it just makes sense that they would pose a threat.

In the paper, we identify several intuitions that may affect people’s perception of GMOs. Psychological essentialism,
for instance, makes us think of DNA as an organism’s “essence” - an
unobservable and immutable core that causes the organism’s behaviour and
development and determines its identity. As such, when a gene is
transferred between two distantly related species, people are likely to
believe that this process will cause characteristics typical of the
source organism to emerge in the recipient. For example, in an opinion
survey in the United States, more than half of respondents said that a
tomato modified with fish DNA would taste like fish (of course, it would
not).Essentialism clearly plays a role in public attitudes
towards GMOs. People are typically more opposed to GM applications that
involve the transfer of DNA between two different species (“transgenic”)
than within the same species (“cisgenic”). Anti-GMO organizations, such
as NGOs, exploit these intuitions by publishing images of tomatoes with
fish tails or by telling the public that companies modify corn with
scorpion DNA to make crispier cereals. Intuitions about
purposes and intentions also have an impact on people’s thinking about
GMOs. They render us vulnerable to the idea that purely natural
phenomena exist or happen for a purpose that is intended by some agent.
These assumptions are part and parcel of religious beliefs, but in
secular environments they lead people to regard nature as a beneficial
process or entity that secures our wellbeing and that humans shouldn’t
meddle with. In the context of opposition to GMOs, genetic modification
is deemed “unnatural” and biotechnologists are accused of “playing God”.
The popular term “Frankenfood” captures what is at stake: by going
against the will of nature in an act of hubris, we are bound to bring
enormous disaster upon ourselves.

he
Navy is planning to open its elite SEAL teams to women who can pass the
grueling training regimen, the service's top officer said Tuesday in an
exclusive interview.

Adm. Jon Greenert said he and the head of
Naval Special Warfare Command, Rear Adm. Brian Losey, believe that if
women can pass the legendary six-month Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL
training, they should be allowed to serve.

"Why shouldn't anybody
who can meet these [standards] be accepted? And the answer is, there is
no reason," Greenert said Tuesday in an exclusive interview with Navy
Times and its sister publication Defense News. "So we're on a track to
say, 'Hey look, anybody who can meet the gender non-specific standards,
then you can become a SEAL.'"

The
push to integrate the storied SEAL brotherhood is coming on the heels
of a comprehensive review led by Losey, the head of Naval Special
Warfare Command, that recommended women be allowed under the same
exacting standards required of male candidates. Final approval is still
pending. The Army and Air Force are also moving to open all combat jobs
to women, according to officials who spoke to the Associated Press. It's
believed the Marine Corps may seek to keep its ground combat jobs,
including the infantry, male-only.

The far right is pitting God against women. Mike Huckabee's support for
the decision to deny a 10-year-old rape victim an abortion is just
another example in a long history that continues this election season.

At
Fox News' Republican Presidential debate in Cleveland, Jeb Bush boasted
that, informed by his faith, he "defunded planned parenthood and
created a culture of life in my state." When Megyn Kelly asked Scott
Walker if he would "really let a mother die rather than have an
abortion," he refused to temper his position that there should be no
exceptions to his "pro-life" position.

Ted Cruz professed "God
speaks to me every day through the scriptures and this informs my
position on religious liberty, life, and marriage." And Marco Rubio
argued that even in the case of rape, women should not have the ability
to make choices about their pregnancies. Sadly, such proclamations
ignore individual rights, freedom of religion, and the fact that faith
as a guiding principle can be dangerous when the foundational teachings
of social justice are ignored.

In an effort to create a "moral"
society, women's health and welfare are nothing more than political
pawns for too many Republicans. The supposed secular nature of the
nation aside, the parameters of the pro-life conversation are severely
limited in scope. Claiming they are focused on protecting life in the
name of God, such views ignore the interconnection between such
legislation and poverty rates. Politicians who brag about defunding
Planned Parenthood ignore that nearly all federal funding received by
the organization goes to contraception and other essential health
services. Under Jeb Bush's "culture of life," Florida became one of the
worst states for women's health and wellbeing in the nation. Sr. Joan
Chittister has explained these political notions are pro-birth; little
attention is given to what becomes of children once they are born or to
the women who have given birth.

Even Joe Biden, who acknowledged
that his Catholic values - particularly in relation to reproductive
health -- should not be forced upon other Americans, fails to recognize
that Catholicism supports the wellbeing of women. Reproductive health is
a social justice issue and refusal to grant access perpetuates the
oppression of women.

I support BLM's cause, but not its approach.

By Barbara ReynoldsAugust 24, 2015As the rapper Tef Poe sharply pointed out
at a St. Louis rally in October protesting the death of unarmed
teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.: “This ain’t your grandparents’
civil rights movement.”

He’s right. It looks, sounds and feels
different. Black Lives Matter is a motley-looking group to this
septuagenarian grandmother, an activist in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Many in my crowd admire the cause and courage of these young activists
but fundamentally disagree with their approach. Trained in the
tradition of Martin Luther King Jr., we were nonviolent activists who
won hearts by conveying respectability and changed laws by delivering a
message of love and unity. BLM seems intent on rejecting our proven
methods. This movement is ignoring what our history has taught.

The
baby boomers who drove the success of the civil rights movement want to
get behind Black Lives Matter, but the group’s confrontational and
divisive tactics make it difficult. In the 1960s, activists confronted
white mobs and police with dignity and decorum, sometimes dressing in
church clothes and kneeling in prayer during protests to make a clear
distinction between who was evil and who was good.

But at protests
today, it is difficult to distinguish legitimate activists from the mob
actors who burn and loot. The demonstrations are peppered with hate speech, profanity, and guys with sagging pants
that show their underwear. Even if the BLM activists aren’t the ones
participating in the boorish language and dress, neither are they
condemning it.

The 1960s movement also had an innate
respectability because our leaders often were heads of the black church,
as well. Unfortunately, church and spirituality are not high priorities
for Black Lives Matter, and the ethics of love, forgiveness and
reconciliation that empowered black leaders such as King and Nelson
Mandela in their successful quests to win over their oppressors are
missing from this movement. The power of the spiritual approach was
evident recently in the way relatives of the nine victims in the
Charleston church shooting responded at the bond hearing for Dylann Roof, the young white man who reportedly confessed to killing the church members “to start a race war.”
One by one, the relatives stood in the courtroom, forgave the accused
racist killer and prayed for mercy on his soul. As a result, in the wake
of that horrific tragedy, not a single building was burned down. There
was no riot or looting.

“Their response was solidly spiritual, one
of forgiveness and mercy for the perpetrator,” the Rev. Andrew Young, a
top King aide, told me in a recent telephone interview.

“White
supremacy is a sickness,” said Young, who also has served as a U.S.
congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, and mayor of Atlanta.
“You don’t get angry with sick people; you work to heal the system. If
you get angry, it is contagious, and you end up acting as bad as the
perpetrators.”

Once,
a long time ago, a rock star was a free-spirited, convention-flouting
artist/rebel/hero/Dionysian fertility god who fronted a world-famous
band, sold millions of records and headlined stadium concerts where
people were trampled in frenzies of cultlike fervor. Someone who smashed
guitars, trashed hotel rooms, developed Byzantine drug problems and
tried to mask evidence of his infidelity with the strategically applied
scent of breakfast burritos. Despite what his ‘‘Behind the Music’’
episode would invariably reveal, a ‘‘rock star’’ — or the Platonic ideal
of a rock star — was not just a powder keg of charisma and unresolved
childhood issues, but a revolutionary driven by a need to assert the
primacy of the self in an increasingly alienating commercial world.

Now,
60 years, give or take, since the phrase came into existence, ‘‘rock
star’’ has made a complete about-face. In its new incarnation, it is
more likely to refer to a programmer, salesperson, social-media
strategist, business-to-business telemarketer, recruiter, management
consultant or celebrity pastry chef than to a person in a band. The term
has become shorthand for a virtuosity so exalted it borders on genius —
only for some repetitive, detail-oriented task. It flatters the person
being spoken about by shrouding him in mystique while also conferring a
Svengali-like power on the person speaking. Posting a listing for a job
for which only ‘‘rock stars’’ need apply casts an H.R. manager as a kind
of corporate Malcolm McLaren; that nobody is looking for a front-end
developer who is addicted to heroin or who bites the heads off doves in
conference rooms goes without saying. Pretty much anyone can be a ‘‘rock
star’’ these days — except actual rock stars, who are encouraged to
think of themselves as brands.

This bizarre transposition goes
back to the turn of the millennium, when the idea of a ‘‘creative
class’’ was popularized in books like Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth
Anderson’s ‘‘The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing
the World’’ and Richard Florida’s ‘‘The Rise of the Creative Class,’’
which argued that innovation would drive growth in the 21st century. The
creative class, according to these thinkers, valued the cool things in
life. More than money and status, they cared about authenticity,
activism, ecology and the interconnectedness of all things. They were
more egalitarian, more into personal growth. Whereas the popular
business literature of the 1980s urged managers to imagine themselves as
fierce, merciless warriors (Sun Tzu’s ancient treatise ‘‘The Art of
War’’ was required reading for many American executives and business
students), by the end of the century, consultants at McKinsey had
declared a ‘‘war for talent.’’ Business writers in the new millennium
reconceptualized men in suits (or hoodies) as social revolutionaries.

According
to a 2013 study in The Human Resource Management Review, ‘‘talent,’’ in
its new usage, could refer to qualities, like natural ability and
technical mastery, or it could refer to talented people, as in a subset
of elite, superskilled workers, or it could mean all people, no
matter how untalented. On the HBO show ‘‘Silicon Valley’’ (in which, in
a recent episode, a pretty event manager introduced the benightedly
dorky programmers Dinesh and Gilfoyle as ‘‘rock stars’’ to her sexy,
unimpressed stunt man boyfriend), Nelson Bighetti, known as Big Head, is
a prime example of this last category. Big Head is an inept app developer
whose swift rise through the ranks of his company, Hooli, makes no
sense to his colleagues — which of course it shouldn’t, because it’s all
just part of a cynical legal strategy. But Hooli, a very loose spoof of
Google, is a faith-driven ‘‘culture’’ led by a ‘‘visionary,’’ Gavin
Belson. To doubt his talent for spotting ‘‘talent’’ would border on
apostasy. Belson is a ‘‘rock star,’’ and Big Head becomes a rock star by
association. ‘‘Silicon Valley’’ nails this particular lexical puffery:
the way that language can create power in the most ridiculous, illogical
ways. Rock star ad absurdum.

The famed economist examines Greece's debt crisis and the lessons of World War II Germany has resolutely ignored

On August 18, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz joined Harper’s Magazine deputy editor Christopher Beha at Book Culture
in New York to discuss the Greek financial crisis. In Stiglitz’s view,
the latest bailout not only ensures that the country’s depression will
worsen, but undermines the entire European project. Bad
economic ideas inflict untold human suffering. When they come cloaked in
a fog of Orwellian obfuscation, their poison and effects can spread
with little hindrance. The public is misled. Power plays are hidden from
view.

In Greece, where suicide rates have risen sharply in the wake of austerity measures, people lose hope.Joseph
Stiglitz, who has been following the Greek crisis closely and is
recently returned from Athens, sets himself to the task of cutting
through the fog. His plain English and fearless use of moral language to
expose the ugliness behind economic and political abstractions lend
clarity to a situation that is not just bringing a nation to its knees,
but threatening to destroy the European project and bring on a future of
conflict and hardship.

In discussing Greece’s Third Memorandum of
Understanding and its draconian terms, Stiglitz observes that the MoU
is really a “surrender document” that eclipses the country’s economic
sovereignty and ensures that Greece’s depression — already deeper than
America’s Great Depression — will get worse. An economy that is seeing
youth unemployment reaching up to 60 percent is likely to lose another 5
percent in GDP. That is over and beyond the 25 percent plunge in GDP
the country has suffered since the imposition of austerity measures.

Socially
conservative Germans, Stiglitz warns, are doubling down on the
discredited notion that austerity policies help economies recover in
times of crisis. In reality, the insistence on keeping wages down,
stripping bargaining power from workers, forcing small business owners
to pay taxes a year in advance, and cutting pensions will only hamper
demand and lead to a deepening spiral of debt. (Stiglitz emphasizes that
hardly any of the money loaned to Greece has actually gone to help the
Greeks themselves, but rather private-sector creditors, namely German
and French banks).

To
avoid sexual harassment I’ve imposed my own curfew, and try to be in
bed by 11pm. I can’t believe women have to live like this in 2015

My
Mum once told me her biggest regret was that she’d brought her
daughters up to be so polite. It happened after one of my little sisters
came home in tears. A “friendly” man at the train station had started
making comments about her legs and asking if she had a boyfriend. “I
really wanted to ignore him, but I didn’t want to be rude! I didn’t know
what to do!” she wept. She was 14 at the time.

There’s obviously
something about a quiet coach and a station buffet that encourages pervy
passengers. British Transport Police have just announced
that the number of sexual offences on trains and at stations has gone
up by 25% in the past year, and is now at record levels. Any travelling
woman who has ever sunk down in her seat and opened her book, only to be
tapped on the shoulder and asked “What are you reading, then?” will be
surprised that the numbers aren’t higher.

We’ve all been bothered
by persistent guys who pester us relentlessly, believing themselves to
be entitled to our company and more. We’re under pressure to be polite
and manage their expectations. Ignored men are angry men, and it’s
horrible to sit silently while a man shouts at a packed carriage: “She
thinks she’s too good to talk to me!”

When it comes to responding
to harassers, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t – and
sometimes it gets to the point when dealing with entitled idiots is so
exhausting that you feel safer staying at home.

When I was a
student, I lived on a safe, central road in York right between the city
centre and the university campus. For a while I was happy to walk up and
down the road on my own, earphones in, handbag stuffed full of unread
translations of Beowulf. Then one day, in the early afternoon, a large
man grabbed my elbow and removed an ear bud. “What’s your name?” he
asked. I was so stunned that it took me a full five seconds to realise
that his hand was down his trousers. I stammered and stuttered, and he
repeated the question. The two men who worked in the greengrocer across
the street were laughing. “Oh, don’t worry! It’s Bill! He doesn’t mean
any harm,” chuckled one, as Bill released me and set off in search of
fresh female elbows.

There
is a lot that is annoying, and even terrible, about aging. The
creakiness of the body; the drifting of the memory; the reprising of
personal history ad nauseam, with only yourself to listen.

But
there is also something profoundly liberating about aging: an attitude,
one that comes hard won.

Only when you hit 60 can you begin to say,
with great aplomb: “I’m too old for this.”

This
line is about to become my personal mantra. I have been rehearsing it
vigorously, amazed at how amply I now shrug off annoyances that once
would have knocked me off my perch.

A younger woman advised me that “old” may be the wrong word, that I should consider I’m too wise for this, or too smart. But old is the word I want. I’ve earned it.

And
let’s just start with being an older woman, shall we? Let others feel
bad about their chicken wings — and their bottoms, their necks and their
multitude of creases and wrinkles. I’m too old for this. I spent years,
starting before I was a teenager, feeling insecure about my looks.

No
feature was spared. My hairline: Why did I have to have a widow’s peak,
at 10? My toes: too short. My entire body: too fat, and once, even, in
the depths of heartbreak, much too thin. Nothing felt right. Well, O.K.,
I appreciated my ankles. But that’s about it.

What
torture we inflict upon ourselves. If we don’t whip ourselves into
loathing, then mean girls, hidden like trolls under every one of life’s
bridges, will do it for us.

Even
the vogue for strange-looking models is little comfort; those women
look perfectly, beautifully strange, in a way that no one else does.
Otherwise we would all be modeling.

One
day recently I emptied out an old trunk. It had been locked for years; I
had lost the key and forgotten what was in there. But, curiosity
getting the best of me on a rainy afternoon, I managed to pry it open
with a screwdriver.

It
was full of photographs. There I was, ages 4 to 40. And I saw for the
first time that even when I was in the depths of despair about my looks,
I had been beautiful.

Do you accept the Police version of the "Biker Gang War in Waco"?
What if I were to tell you there is evidence that most if not all of the
killings were committed by Police armed with M4 assault weapons (the
actual definition of assault weapon includes the ability to fire bursts
or fully automatic.)

I know members of a couple of clubs involved who claim the police did all the shooting.In
the US we are trained from infancy to think of ourselves as a class
free society. In reality class oppression is every bit as real as
racism. Also our society is rigidly class segregated.When was the last time you described someone as "white trash"? Or "trailer park"?

After
three days of peaceful demonstrations marking the one year anniversary
of Michael Brown's fatal shooting in Ferguson, Mo., yet another
African-American man was shot by police there. While the facts are still
unclear, the tragedy will surely add to the national protests
challenging our racially biased structures of criminal injustice.

A
week earlier, a young, unarmed man was shot to death by a police officer
in Seneca, South Carolina. Only this young man was not black, but
white.

According to CNN,
Zachary Hammond was fatally shot while in a Hardee's parking lot. He
was 19 years old and on a date. The police officer was conducting a drug
investigation and claims that he shot Hammond in self-defense when the
unarmed teenager drove his car at him.

A small amount of marijuana
was found in the front passenger compartment. Police said the target of
the investigation was not Hammond but his date. An independent autopsy
showed, however, that Hammond was shot in the back, not the front,
contradicting the official story.

"He was a 19-year-old, 121-pound kid killed basically for a joint," the family attorney Eric Bland said.

CNN reported
that if this had been an African-American victim, it would have
received national attention. That is true now, but only because an
active movement of demonstrators have made it so. In fact, virtually the
only protests to Hammond's death were issued by #BlackLivesMatter
activists on social media.

One year after Michael Brown's fatal
shooting in Ferguson, unarmed black men are still seven times more
likely than whites to die by police gunfire, according to a new study by the Washington Post.So far this year, the Post reports, 24 unarmed black men have been shot and killed by police -- one every nine days. The Post reports that 585 people in total have been shot and killed by police through August 7. (The Guardian database reports that 700 have been killed by police.)

There
is no question that African-American men are at greatest risk. After
the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, national protests have forced
reform of the police and of mass incarceration policies onto the
national agenda. The names of those who died from police violence --
Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Samuel DuBose, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice,
Freddy Gray, Sandra Bland and more -- are etched in public memory
because demonstrators have demanded justice for them.

Over 400 acres of the Queets Rainforest, located in Olympic National Park in Washington State, nearby where I live, have burned recently,
and it is continuing to burn as I type this. Fires in these rainforests
have historically been rare, as the area typically receives in excess
of 200 inches of rain annually.

But this is all changing now.

The new normal is that there is no longer any "normal."

The new normal regarding climate disruption is that, for the planet, today is better than tomorrow.Another
perfect example of this is a crucial recent study led by James Hansen,
the former director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The
study, authored by Hansen and more than a dozen other scientists and
published online,
warns that even staying within the internationally agreed goal of
keeping the planet within the 2-degree Celsius temperature warming limit
has already caused unstoppable melting in the Antarctic and Greenland
ice sheets. The study shows that this will raise global sea levels by as much as 10 feet by the year 2050, inundating numerous major coastal cities with seawater.

As if that's not enough, Hansen's study comes on the heels of another study published in Science,
which shows that global sea levels could rise by at least 20 feet, even
if governments manage to keep global temperature increases to within
the agreed upon "safe" limit of 2 degrees Celsius. The study warns that
it is quite possible that 75 feet of sea level rise could well
already be unstoppable given current carbon dioxide levels in the
atmosphere and recent studies that show how rapidly Greenland and
several Antarctic ice sheets are melting.

Disconcertingly, another new "normal" this month comes in the form of huge plumes of wildfire smoke over the Arctic.
At the time of this writing, well over 12 million acres of forest and
tundra in Canada and Alaska have burned in wildfires, and the smoke
covering the Arctic sea ice is yet another anthropogenic climate
disruption (ACD) amplifying feedback loop that will accelerate melting
there. The additional smoke further warms the atmosphere that quickens
the melting of the Arctic ice pack.

The
Army on Monday announced two women and 94 men met the standards of the
course's third and final phase, also known as the Swamp Phase.Two women
will graduate from Ranger School on Friday, becoming the first women to
earn the Ranger Tab.

Their graduation ceremony will take place on Victory Pond at Fort Benning, Georgia.

The women are part of the Army's gender-integrated assessment of the grueling two-month Ranger School.

The
assessment has drawn a high level of scrutiny, with many questioning
whether the Army is lowering its standards for the elite school — which
until now was open only to men — while many others have cheered on the
female students.

Army officials insisted the standards were not changed in any way.

"Congratulations
to all of our new Rangers," Army Secretary John McHugh said in a
statement. "Each Ranger School graduate has shown the physical and
mental toughness to successfully lead organizations at any level. This
course has proven that every soldier, regardless of gender, can achieve
his or her full potential."

McHugh added: "We owe soldiers the
opportunity to serve successfully in any position where they are
qualified and capable, and we continue to look for ways to select,
train, and retain the best soldiers to meet our nation's needs."

The
women, both officers, started the Swamp Phase on Aug. 1 after three
tries at the school's first phase, known as the Darby Phase, at Fort
Benning, Georgia, and one try at the second phase, known as the Mountain
Phase, in Dahlonega, Georgia.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Something
strange is happening in the Republican primary — something strange,
that is, besides the Trump phenomenon. For some reason, just about all
the leading candidates other than The Donald have taken a deeply
unpopular position, a known political loser, on a major domestic policy
issue. And it’s interesting to ask why.

The
issue in question is the future of Social Security, which turned 80
last week. The retirement program is, of course, both extremely popular
and a long-term target of conservatives, who want to kill it precisely
because its popularity helps legitimize government action in general. As
the right-wing activist Stephen Moore (now chief economist of the
Heritage Foundation) once declared, Social Security is “the soft underbelly of the welfare state”; “jab your spear through that” and you can undermine the whole thing.

But
that was a decade ago, during former President George W. Bush’s attempt
to privatize the program — and what Mr. Bush learned was that the
underbelly wasn’t that soft after all. Despite the political momentum
coming from the G.O.P.’s victory in the 2004 election, despite support
from much of the media establishment, the assault on Social Security
quickly crashed and burned. Voters, it turns out, like Social Security
as it is, and don’t want it cut.

It’s
remarkable, then, that most of the Republicans who would be president
seem to be lining up for another round of punishment. In particular,
they’ve been declaring that the retirement age — which has already been
pushed up from 65 to 66, and is scheduled to rise to 67 — should go up
even further.

Thus, Jeb Bush says that the retirement age should be pushed back to “68 or 70”. Scott Walker has echoed that position. Marco Rubio wants both to raise the retirement age and to cut benefits for higher-income seniors. Rand Paul wants to raise the retirement age to 70 and means-test benefits. Ted Cruz wants to revive the Bush privatization plan.

For the record, these proposals would be really bad public policy — a harsh blow to Americans in the bottom half
of the income distribution, who depend on Social Security, often have
jobs that involve manual labor, and have not, in fact, seen a big rise
in life expectancy. Meanwhile, the decline of private pensions has left
working Americans more reliant on Social Security than ever.

And
no, Social Security does not face a financial crisis; its long-term
funding shortfall could easily be closed with modest increases in
revenue.

In the "cradle of Islam," a growing number of people are quietly declaring themselves nonbelievers

JEDDAH,
Saudi Arabia — In this country known as the cradle of Islam, where
religion gives legitimacy to the government and state-appointed clerics
set rules for social behavior, a growing number of Saudis are privately
declaring themselves atheists.

The evidence is anecdotal, but persistent.

“I
know at least six atheists who confirmed that to me,” said Fahad
AlFahad, 31, a marketing consultant and human rights activist. “Six or
seven years ago, I wouldn’t even have heard one person say that. Not
even a best friend would confess that to me.”

A Saudi journalist in Riyadh has observed the same trend.

“The
idea of being irreligious and even atheist is spreading because of the
contradiction between what Islamists say and what they do,” he said.

The
perception that atheism is no longer a taboo subject — at least two
Gulf-produced television talk shows recently discussed it — may explain
why the government has made talk of atheism a terrorist offense. The March 7 decree from
the Ministry of Interior prohibited, among other things, “calling for
atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals
of the Islamic religion on which this country is based.”

The
number of people willing to admit to friends to being atheist or to
declare themselves atheist online, usually under aliases, is certainly
not big enough to be a movement or threaten the government. A 2012 poll
by WIN-Gallup International of about 500 Saudis found that 5 percent described themselves as “convinced atheist.” This was well below the global average of 13 percent.

But
the greater willingness to privately admit to being atheist reflects a
general disillusionment with religion and what one Saudi called “a
growing notion” that religion is being misused by authorities to control
the population. This disillusionment is seen in a number of ways,
ranging from ignoring clerical pronouncements to challenging and even
mocking religious leaders on social media.“Because people are
becoming more disillusioned with the government, they started looking at
the government and its support groups as being in bed together and
conspiring together against the good of the people,” said Bassim Alim, a
lawyer in Jeddah.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Two
renowned scientists—Stanford's Paul Ehrlich and UC-Berkeley's John
Harte — argue that feeding the planet goes way beyond food.
Revolutionary political, economic and social shifts are necessary to
avoid unprecedented chaos.

by Brian BienkowskiPublished on Wednesday, August 05, 20159 by Environmental Health NewsHow do you make sure billions of people around the world have access to food?

You start a revolution.

At
least that’s what two leading U.S. scientists argue in a new report.
Feeding people will require cleaner energy, smarter farming and women’s
rights, but also a “fundamental cultural change,” according to Paul
Ehrlich, president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford
University, and University of California, Berkeley, professor and
researcher John Harte.

“What is obvious to us is ... that if
humanity is to avoid a calamitous loss of food security, a fast,
society-pervading sea-change as dramatic as the first agricultural
revolution will be required,” they wrote in their report published last week in the International Journal of Environmental Studies.The
amount of humans on Earth is growing—projections point to an extra 2.5
billion people by 2020. But tangled within the problem of more hungry
mouths is environmental degradation, social injustice and humans pushing
toward the very boundaries of the planet when it comes to resources
such as food, water and energy, according to Ehrlich and Harte.

For
many people across the world growing, buying or finding food is a daily
struggle. More than 800 million people are estimated to be
malnourished, according to the United Nations.

Billions don’t have stable, secure access to food.

“Some
people say the whole problem is too many people and other people say
it’s misdistribution of the crops we grow,” Ehrlich said in an
interview. “They’re both right but this can’t be fixed by dealing with
only one end of the problem.”

Scientists for too long have been looking at how to feed the world in “fragments,” Ehrlich said.“Some
look at solving food problems with crops grown in higher temperatures;
some look at reducing waste,” he said. “It’s crystal clear that none of
the things that need to be done are being done on a scale that would be
helpful.”

It’s not just about pumping out more crops or reducing
the amount of people. “Planning for a sustainable and effective food
production system will surely require heeding constraints from nature,”
Ehrlich and Harte wrote.

They argue that economic equality,
population growth and environmental health are all linked. Governments
must address the whole system to avoid future famine.

Claiming
the Quran’s support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery inconquered
regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool.

QADIYA,
Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic
State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was
not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than
Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned
and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

“I
kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is
so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me
that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said
that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an
interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she
escaped after 11 months of captivity.

The
systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority
has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology
of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was
reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls
who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the
group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been
enshrined in the group’s core tenets.

The
trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent
infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held,
viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated
fleet of buses used to transport them.

A
total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are
still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the
Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery,
including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run
Islamic courts. And the practice has become an established recruiting
tool to lure men from deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual
sex is taboo and dating is forbidden.

A
growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has
established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual
issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last
month. Repeatedly, the ISIS leadership has emphasized a narrow and
selective reading of the Quran and other religious rulings to not only
justify violence, but also to elevate and celebrate each sexual assault
as spiritually beneficial, even virtuous.

After decades of semi-secrecy, a commune for L.G.B.T.Q. nonconformists has slowly begun to join the mainstream.

By Alex HalberstadtAug. 6, 2015

Several
years ago, David Withers, a zoologist with the Tennessee Department of
Environment and Conservation, was digging for crayfish in some creek
beds on the edge of DeKalb County, in an area that can plausibly be
described as nowhere at all, when he spotted an unmarked road. He had
never noticed it and decided to see where it led; after a short drive,
he found himself amid a strange encampment. Withers stepped out of his
truck and looked around. Cheerful, rickety houses sprouted from the
ground like unclassified fungi, or something dreamed up by Lewis
Carroll, but what appealed to him most was the barn; on the side, in
large yellow letters, someone had written ‘‘Welcome Home.’’ Withers
walked up to a shack that appeared to be inhabited and — overtaken by
curiosity — he knocked. The woman who came out looked surprised. She
told him that he was on a commune for gay, lesbian and transgender
people and suggested politely that he leave. Later, Withers called his
friend Neal Appelbaum, the openly gay director of the arts center in
neighboring Cannon County, and told him about what he saw. Appelbaum
explained that Withers had stumbled into Ida, a commune for queer
vegetarians; the entire region was home to maybe a dozen rural planned
communities for L.G.B.T.Q. people, a kind of sexually nonconforming
Amish country. He also pointed out that the fading sign on the barn
didn’t say ‘‘Welcome Home.’’ The last letter was not an ‘‘e’’ but an
‘‘o.’’

If you’re younger than, say, 35, chances are you don’t
remember what it was like to be a gay man between the Stonewall riots
and the second season of ‘‘Will & Grace.’’ You probably don’t
remember bars with names like Traxx and Rawhide, their windows smoked to
deflect the accidental glances of co-­workers, bars with ‘‘Elvira,
Mistress of the Dark’’ playing on VHS, where everyone who came through
the door was greeted with looks of longing and fear. You probably don’t
remember the Herb Ritts poster of the Pennzoil-­smeared Adonis hefting
semi tires, or the Mr. Fire Island Leather contest, or hearing the
entire godawful Barbra Streisand Christmas album played over the P.A.
while waiting for the bus outside the Castro Theater, or having to take
that bus for a half-hour in the first place simply to buy lubricant,
which was sold as illicitly as a bong. You’ve probably never heard an
otherwise-­reasonable family internist wonder out loud whether your sore
throat might be seroconversion illness or the tingling in your fingers a
symptom of H.I.V. neuropathy. You’ve probably never had a prospective
landlord explain, upon meeting you and your partner, that the vacant
apartment in his building is not, as the listing said, ‘‘available
immediately’’ but needs to be painted, and that the painting will take
seven weeks. And if you don’t remember any of that, consider yourself
fortunate.

In those days, the social lives of gay people
transpired mostly in large coastal cities, primarily out of public view.
The bars and restaurants, the beach resorts and borderland
neighborhoods became sanctuaries where, through a tacit agreement with
the surrounding world, you could socialize mostly free of scrutiny and
overt discrimination. For the young men who settled in these
neighborhoods, even that Streisand record functioned as a sanctuary of
sorts, by providing a common cultural language with a larger community
of gay men whom they were counting on to be their families, because in
many cases their actual families no longer wanted to know them. But for
some, this notion of sanctuary did not go far enough. For some, the
modes of camouflage, code and passing were tantamount to an admission of
leading a life defined and hemmed in by others. And so they began to
leave the cities in search of a less compromised identity.

In
1979, a gay rights activist, communist and Angeleno named Harry Hay — a
founder of a neo-­pagan countercultural movement called the Radical
Faeries — urged gay men to ‘‘throw off the ugly green frog skin of
hetero-­imitation.’’ Instead of fighting for the rights that straights
had, like marriage and adoption, the faeries believed that to be gay was
to possess a unique nature and a special destiny apart from straight
people, and that this destiny would reach its full flowering in the
wilds of rural America. So it was perhaps fitting that the faeries began
to refer to their secluded outposts as sanctuaries. There are more than
a dozen loosely affiliated sanctuaries across three continents today,
but in the same year that Hay made his pronouncement, the mother ship of
the faeries landed on Short Mountain, one of the tallest points in
Middle Tennessee. It remains home to what is almost certainly the
largest, oldest, best known and most visited planned community for
lesbian, gay and transgender people in the country, a place that one
local described to me as a veritable Gayberry, U.S.A.

With its
outhouses, goats and vegetable gardens, it doesn’t appear far different
from your textbook commune. Until, that is, you hear about a spot called
Sex Change Ridge, a network of hiking trails called the Fruit Loop and a
functionary called the Empress. Many residents are known by names of
their own devising, like Jazz Hands, Fade-Dra Phey and Helvetica
Demi-­Oblique. Twice a year, hundreds of visitors come to the mountain
for weeklong gatherings that, sartorially speaking, make Burning Man
look like the annual conference of the Modern Language Association. In
the decades since its founding, dozens of people not personally cut out
for communal living but nonetheless drawn by Short Mountain have settled
in the area, most of them men, and they tend to refer to one another as
the Family and to the area as the Neighborhood or the Gayborhood. Some
inhabit one of the numerous satellite communities — places with names
like Breathwood, Daffodil Meadow and Ida — and others treat the area as a
part-time second home, coming here as much for the privacy as the
fellowship. The name of the commune is no secret and can be found online
with a few keystrokes. But as with Occupy Wall Street, its residents
reach decisions by consensus, and because some harbor misgivings about
being the subjects of stories and other forms of publicity, many spoke
to me on the condition that I don’t reveal the name of their home in
print. So forthwith I will call it the Commune.

In 2005, I argued
that ice sheets may be more vulnerable than the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated, mainly because of effects of a
warming ocean in speeding ice melt. In 2007, I wrote
"Scientific Reticence and Sea Level Rise," describing and documenting a
phenomenon that pressures scientists to minimize the danger of imminent
sea level rise.

About then I became acquainted with remarkable
studies of geologist Paul Hearty. Hearty found strong evidence for sea
level rise late in the Eemian to +6-9 m (20-30 feet) relative to today.
The Eemian is the prior interglacial period (~120,000 years ago), which
was slightly warmer than the present interglacial period (the Holocene)
in which civilization developed. Hearty also found evidence for powerful
storms in the North Atlantic near the end of the Eemian period.

It
seemed that an understanding of the late Eemian climate events might be
helpful in assessing the climate effects of human-made global warming,
as Earth is now approaching the warmth that existed then. Thus several
colleagues and I initiated global climate simulations aimed at trying to
understand what happened at the end of the Eemian and its relevance to
climate change today.

More than eight years later, we are
publishing a paper describing these studies. We are publishing the paper
in an open-access "Discussion" journal, which allows the paper to
become public while undergoing peer-review (a pdf of the paper with
figures imbedded in the text for easier reading is available here).
I will get to the reasons for that in a moment, but first let me
mention some curious numerology to get you thinking about scientific
reticence.

Did you read any of the recent papers that concluded
ice sheets may be disintegrating and might cause large sea level rise in
200-900 years? The time needed for ice sheets to respond to climate
change is uncertain, and there are proponents for time scales covering a
huge range. However, 200-900 years should cause a scientist to scratch
his head. If it is uncertain by an order of magnitude or more, why not
100-1000? Where does the 200-900 precision come from?

Why the
peculiar 900 years instead of the logical 1000? Probably because nobody
cares about matters 1000 years in the future (they may not care about
900, but 200-900 does not seem like infinity). A scientist knowing that
sea level is a problem does not want the reader to dismiss it.

Why
200 years? For one thing, 100 years would require taking on the
formidable IPCC, which estimates that even the huge climate forcing for a
hypothetical 936 ppm CO2 in 2100 would yield less than one meter sea
level rise. For another thing, incentives for scientists strongly favor
conservative statements and militate against any "alarmist" conclusion;
this is the "reticence" phenomenon that infects the sea level rise
issue2. "Scientific Reticence and Sea Level Rise" will be the subject of
a session at the American Geophysical Union meeting this year.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson